* Werner LEMBERG wrote on Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 07:18:46AM CET:
Anyway, maintainer-mode isn't very interesting; few packages use it.
The more important question is what to do in non-maintainer mode,
where (it seems to me) exactly the same problem will occur. For
instance, in GNU Hello (well, except that has only one man page) or
coreutils.
Well, if `make' called by the user has to generate man pages with the
use of help2man, there *must* be a configure check for it. I don't
see a problem.
The point is that this problem should only ever show up when you use
VCS sources to build from, never from a release tarball: the tarball
should always contain a copy of the man pages, and not need to rebuild
them. Thus it would be over-reaching for example, to require that
help2man is present, when configure is run from an extracted tarball.